To understand how increasing the FAIRness of digital resources might maximize their reuse, we need toevaluate the FAIRness of digital objects (DOs) through metrics, - to obtain an assessment that provides feedback to content creators about the degree that they enable others to find and reuse DOs.

This means, that communities should not only understand what is meant by FAIR, but also be able to monitor the FAIRness of their digital resources, in a realistic, but quantitative manner.

"FAIRness - the degree to which a digital resource is Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable - is aspirational, yet the means of reaching it may be defined by increased adherence to measurable indicators", - A design framework and exemplar metrics for FAIRness, by Wilkinson e t al., bioRxiv, 2017

TheGO FAIR Metrics Groupfocuses on the development of such metrics to assess compliance to each and every one of the FAIR principles. To this end, the group has created a cogent framework for developing FAIR metrics manifested as a simple form with questions that structures fruitful conversations about proposed metrics.

The group has created several exemplar metrics that could be broadly applicable; however, additional metrics may be designed and published through the group's open submission process, or simply shared within your community through your normal communication channels.

This takes the form of a FAIR Accessor (a kind of Linked Data Platform Container), which describes :

a subset of metrics,

the community to which they are applicable,

other relevant metadata, and

links to each of the associated metrics metadata documents. These metadata documents are written in YAML, and follow the smartAPI annotation patterns for Web Services. As such, each of these documents contains a link to the Metric itself - a Web interface capable of testing a resource's compliance with that metric.